Once More with Feeling ; Some Fine Portraits by Wyndham Lewis Go On Show Tomorrow but in the End, He Was an Intellectual Painter Without Empathy

Summary

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WYNDHAM Lewis has some claim to be the only intellectual painter in the whole history of British art, though I dare say that some working now - Craig-Martin, for example - might argue their right to that small crown. Most of us know little about him for he has not been much exhibited: the Tate's last retrospective was in 1956, a year before his death, and the Imperial War Museum dealt with him as a war artist in 1992. A very few London dealers have held his drawings and watercolours in stock over the past 30 years or so, steadily building interest in him, but one of these rocked the market in the early Eighties when duped by an ingenious forger; one now has to be very wary of any example without a proveable provenance. With such invisibility it is not surprising that, if we know of him at all, it is as the man on the fringe of Bloomsbury who had a flaming row with Roger Fry.

And hurrah I say for that - the row, not the invisibility, for he was the only man in the English-speaking world who saw through that old fraud and was prepared to say so. Much good it did him.

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Extract

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Once More with Feeling ; Some Fine Portraits by Wyndham Lewis Go On Show Tomorrow but in the End, He Was an Intellectual Painter Without Empathy

For most of his life he was a lone prophet in the wilderness, not merely ignored but deliberately excluded by the art establishment - he became, as he said of David Bomberg in 1949, "one of the lost generation that really got lost".

He was, however, his own worst enemy; as much a writer and a novelist as a painter,...

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